


Cinnamon

by charmtion



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Daddy Issues, Dark Jon, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:42:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28550325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmtion/pseuds/charmtion
Summary: ‘It is a secret ache, the want she bears like a bruise: for him to say her name again—slowly.’Sansa returns home for the summer, to a life that Jon never left.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 101
Kudos: 218





	1. Frozen Goods

She takes a summer job at the supermarket. It isn’t glamorous or well-paid. Often her fingertips are so frozen from stocking ice-cream that her phone doesn’t recognise her thumbprint at the end of the day; but she doesn’t mind. The coolness suits her.

They put her in frozen goods because in her first week she dropped a crate of spices packed into little glass tubs. Her throat burned as she knelt to slide a semblance of order to the scattered spray of shards and powder. Cinnamon stuck to her skin, her teeth. It took her a moment to realise that beneath the aromatic dust her cheeks were wet with tears.

Her manager made her pay for it out of her wages. He is a small, neat man with a silver streak in his dark hair. Always smiling. He smells of mint and looks at her dangerously. She avoids being alone with him.

Once, in that same week she dropped the crate of spices, he spent ten minutes berating her for mixing up two different shapes of pasta. She stood with her weight predominantly on one foot, her left arm crossed over her ribcage as she listened intently. She wanted to scream. Wanted to tell him that she was better than him, than this—that she knew the real reason he was boxing her in against the shelves, that she saw the lick of hunger beneath the anger in his eyes, and it disgusted her.

But she said nothing.

She doesn’t want to draw attention to herself. This summer, she wants only to stay as she is now: limned in the lonely light of the frozen goods aisle, made small by it—safe. 

\ \

Theon is the first of her brother’s friends to find her. She looks at him as he leans a hip against the lip of the freezer cabinet she is pouring bags of peas into. He has dark circles beneath his eyes and tobacco-stained fingernails. A lean tiredness clings to the edges of his face as he tries a smile.

‘You’re working here?’

She makes a gesture to her uniform. ‘It would seem so, yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Why does anyone work?’ she says. ‘I need the money. For uni.’

He flexes his fingers around the handle of the metal basket he is carrying. ‘Thought you’d have got a scholarship or something,’ he says. ‘You’re dead smart.’

‘The world’s full of people who are cleverer than me.’ She lifts her shoulder to rub a strand of hair back from her cheek. ‘There’s no money for them either.’

‘How come?’

‘Capitalism,’ she says. ‘Probably.’

She turns back to the freezer cabinet. He lingers for another minute or two. She is acutely aware of how intensely he is looking at her. The weight of it finds its way to her throat and—briefly, madly—she thinks she might start crying again. Then he straightens up and walks away with a word, a wish to see her around.

Relief floods like warm water beneath her skin. Her shoulders sag toward the bright white edges of the cabinet. She takes a breath. The air in her lungs is cold enough to cut. Soon her face is numb; but she doesn’t mind. The coolness suits her.

/ /

In the afternoons when she isn’t working at the supermarket, she walks across the green opposite the house.

By now it’s high summer. The sky hangs like a watercolour, and the air is hazy. Little wisps of grass glide at the knot of her anklebone. Beneath the thin cotton of her tee-shirt, the small of her back is warm and damp. She puts her hand to it, leans into the bracket of her palm as she pauses to take in the view.

It hasn’t changed much—the treeline, the distant glimmer of a lake—but from here it feels like she is looking at another world. Perhaps it is because she has only ever seen the wood and water lit by headlights, a wax-coloured moon. She closes her eyes now, pinches to black those thoughts of long ago. 

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She hooks it out, casts an idle look at the screen. A text from Jeyne, a plea for her to join the others at the pub tonight, a promise that _it’ll be fuuuuun_. She puts the phone back into the pocket of her denim shorts. Digs the toe of her right shoe into the tufts of grass till she loosens a bit of soil beneath the green.

On her way back to the house, she thinks about the text. Neat black letters offer up a dozen different excuses behind her eyes. Even as she considers them, she knows that she won’t use a single one. She gets her phone out from her pocket. By the time she reaches the black-iron gate leading up to the house, Jeyne has replied.

She looks at the screen, at the flash of colours. Three distinct emojis: a firework, a wine glass, a little red love-heart.

\ \

The lipstick she chooses is a darker shade of red. Her mother tells her how pretty she looks; but she isn’t so sure. What feels correct in the city sits wrongly here. The tight black jeans and silky blouse, the moonstone pendant and silver earrings. Her friends will be in flower-patterned prints, flowy dresses that twist like autumn leaves.

She is halfway across the green now; it is too late to turn back.

The low heels of her boots click against the pavement as she steps from the grass down onto it. Buildings bob the space either side of her. Most of the shops are shut, the awnings pulled up and signs brought in from the street. The sky is pale blue; but the air is a little too warm to be comforting.

She floats through her hometown like a ghost. She feels distinct from it, as if everyone else is woven into the bones of the place and she sits more like skin or the downy little hairs on its outer surface. Like she is not bound to it, like she is free to leave again. She enjoys this feeling.

Then she hears a voice, her name a bit of ribbon caught on the barb of it—

‘Sansa?’

—and all at once, she is pulled back into the bones of this place: all its knots and aches. 

/ /

They used to drive down to the water at the outskirts of town, share a bottle of whatever he had managed to nab on his way out from the club. He was Robb’s friend, so their meetings were always secret.

But Robb is gone now, and neither of them have many friends to keep secrets from.

Jeyne and the others sit at a table on the opposite side of the pub. Sansa feels the phone buzz once in her pocket. She doesn’t look at the text on the screen as she sets it to silent and puts it back. Her eyes flick to the faded beermat on the dark tabletop, then lift slowly to track the strong shape of him at the bar.

From here, his shoulders look broader than they did before. Her palms cannot pretend not to know the exact shape of them, even so.

She presses her lips together tightly as she reaches for the beermat, rolls it up between her fingers. It is soft against her skin. She watches as he leans toward the bartender and the dim spotlight above catches the glimmer of silver around his neck. Her throat tightens; she feels like there is cinnamon still stuck to her teeth.

In her pocket, her phone sits silently. She didn’t look at the text on its screen, but she knows what it said—what it says, screams in that shrill voice Jeyne sometimes gets when she is worried—a red exclamation mark after two little words: _Jon Snow_.

His name bears with it a chequered reputation. There are knots of violence hidden away in the branches of his family tree, a pyromaniac or two. He has never committed arson; but half the town over know that he can well use his fists, his feet. She has seen the scars, the bruises made by one boot or the other. Those same boots treading the sticky flagstones toward her now in that quick, wolf-like way all his own.

The wine glass glitters wetly when he sets it down in front of her. She waits until his hand is well away from it before she reaches out to trace a fingertip around its rim. Her eyes fix onto the pink bloom contained within its edges. Distantly, she registers the sound of his tongue clicking against his teeth. Her breath hitches in her throat; but she will not tell of the reasoning behind its halt. 

It is a secret ache, the want she bears like a bruise: for him to say her name again—slowly.

\ \

‘Theon told me you were back in town.’

Her second glass of rosé; the first words he has spoken. She tries to suppress the quickening of her pulse, the ragged drumming of her heart. Her body responds to the gravel in his tone as if years ago was yesterday. Unbidden, networks of touch left by the memory of his fingertips flash like fire beneath her skin.

She does not look at him as she takes a sip of wine. ‘Only for the summer.’

‘Hmm.’

There is an inflection to this sound that makes it lift from his throat like a laugh. She wants to look up as she sets the glass back onto the tabletop; but she knows that she can’t risk it. Because there will not be laughter in his eyes. There will be a calm like the distant eddies of a placid lake, the barest hint of something lurking beneath its glassy surface. Her gaze fixes instead on his right hand, the tattooed knuckles flexed around the beer-bottle. 

‘I thought you might have left by now,’ she says.

‘You don’t leave the Watch.’

Her eyes dip along the letters on his skin. ‘It’s only a bar.’

‘Old Bear would roll in his grave to hear someone say that.’

She looks up. ‘Jeor’s dead?’

‘Aye,’ he says. ‘He left it to me—his faithful doorman.’

His fingers tighten around the beer-bottle. She thinks for a moment that this is what people see—lover and lout alike—before he wrecks them, utterly. His ink-stained hands, the cords of muscle flexing beneath the skin of his forearms. That little sound he makes with his tongue against his teeth.

A prickle of heat blooms at the nape of her neck now. ‘I should go.’

‘Finish your drink first.’

She pushes back from the table. ‘I need to go.’

‘Finish it,’ he says. ‘Please, Sansa.’

Her name in his mouth, the pulse of it carrying on his voice like a heartbeat. It wrecks her, utterly. The air is too warm and still, the sigh she makes must echo like a shout inside the stone walls of the pub, and she needs to get out. She reaches to grasp the glass, lift it to her lips and sink the last of the rosé; but her movement is frantic, clumsy. It slips from her fingers, shatters across the dark tabletop.

She looks down at the spreading stain of wine and thinks of cinnamon, of tears and burning throats.

She leaves the pub; she does not look back.

/ /

The tiles in the staff toilet are pale green. She has learnt the shape of each of them by the time she has risen from her knees.

Gingerly, she finds her way to the sink and washes the taste of bile from her mouth. The water is tepid and metallic. She knows, without looking, that the reflection offered back by the warped mirror on the wall would show her skin to be the same shade as the tiles.

Out on the shop floor, her kinder colleagues cluck and fuss. One asks if she had a little too much to drink last night.

‘Yes,’ she says with a faint smile. ‘Probably.’

Sansa considers joining in with their gentle laughter to accentuate her lie. Perhaps if she smiles a little wider, laughs a little louder she will believe that it was the one and a half glasses of rosé that made her sick—and not everything else. She tries not to think of all the abstract possibilities vying for a place on a list she doesn’t want to make. 

\ \

By the end of the day, the abstract possibilities have been compiled neatly into that list she didn’t want to make. They fall into place, into slim rows and columns as she straightens boxes and digs her hands deep into a pile of frozen chips to try and shock her body, her brain into silence. It doesn’t work. She wills a wine-haze to descend; she aches for quiet.

The tannoy system crackles, blares an instruction for customers to make their way to the check-out counters. Sansa pushes herself away from the freezer cabinet she is leaning against, lets the staff room swallow her whole. Someone wishes her a good rest of the weekend; she remembers that it is Saturday.

‘You too,’ she says.

She is thinking of all the days that have passed since she left the city—the days, the weeks. It felt like the admission of something when she stepped off the platform onto the 13:34 bound for home. As the train creaked closer, that something loomed a little more clearly: guilt, shame—the failure inherent to feeling such things and not acting on them. Being so passive as to feel them in the first place.

‘Go careful.’

Her manager’s voice slips out at the same moment as his hand touches lightly to her elbow. The fleece she is wearing is still chilled, her skin beneath it icy. She feels the dry warmth of his fingertips like a brand. He smiles at her even as she steps back from his touch, gathers her arm across her chest as if he has broken it.

‘You too,’ she says.

‘Oh, I always do.’ His eyes gleam a different shade to the glitter of his smile. ‘But then I am very careful about the company I keep.’

He opens the backdoor, stands aside politely to let her sweep past him with her arm still pinned close to her chest. She smiles faintly at him, ready to pretend that she didn’t notice the bite of his words, that she didn’t catch the latent meaning glowing in his gaze—then she looks up over his shoulder, and she knows she can’t pretend.

She can see the hatchback in the carpark, the paintwork a shade lighter than the tarmac the tires rest on and, through the glint of the windscreen, the ink-stained knuckles flexing idly on the steering-wheel. For a moment she stares at the car numbly, then she makes her way toward it.

_Finish it_ , she thinks. _Please, Sansa_.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know what I’m doing. If you read it, thank you; if you’d like another chapter, tell me! ✨ Happy NY, love charm xoxo


	2. Knives

‘Did he touch you?’

The cool metal of the seatbelt-buckle catches on her fingers. ‘What?’

‘Baelish,’ he says tightly. ‘Did he touch you?’

Sansa looks up from her lap. Her gaze glides across the gearstick, the half-empty water bottle lodged into the centre console. Jon is sitting a little crooked in his seat, as if he was moving to get out of the car at the same moment she was sliding inside it.

‘Your face,’ he says, staring straight ahead. ‘Your arm.’

She thinks of the way she was holding it. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That.’

‘Did he—’

‘No.’

The word is like a thorn on her tongue. It lingers there: a pinprick at the edges of a voice she tries always to keep petal-soft, sweet.

She turns the collar of the fleece up against her throat now, gets the packet of mints out from her pocket. Puts one in her mouth as Jon lights a cigarette with a jaded, familiar movement.

‘I’ll take you home,’ he says.

Sansa moves the mint to her other cheek. ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

‘Hmm.’

That sound, a plume of smoke lifting up with it as he starts the car. She bites down on the mint, feels the thin white limb of it snap cleanly between her teeth.

\ \

He turns right out of the supermarket carpark, takes the longer route that avoids the centre of town.

Clouds cling to the edges of the sky.

Through the glass of the passenger-seat window, Sansa watches them shift and swell. The sky turns a deeper shade of blue, then bleeds to black. She wonders if it will rain.

_Finish it_ , she thinks. _Please, Sansa_.

Her eyes flicker from the dark clouds to the black ink patterning his fingers. His hands rest squarely on the steering-wheel; she aches for them in a way she had thought was long forgotten.

She wants the drive to last forever.

/ /

Memories of the night before merge with those of long ago as the car slips past woodland, water. She can no longer be sure which is which, what touch belongs where. Cinnamon, spilt wine. The things that he said. Heat trails idle fingertips across her nape; a thumbprint blooms at the base of her skull.

When she risks a glance across at him, his hands are still on the steering-wheel.

Sansa takes another mint from the packet in her pocket. He lights a second cigarette, taps ash out of the cracked window. A breath of breeze slices through the interior of the car. She wants to make a noise, a whimper.

They drive past the sign marking the boundary of the town.

‘Where are we going?’

He rubs his thumb against the leather of the steering-wheel. ‘Wherever you’d like.’

‘You said you’d take me home.’

‘Do you want to go home?’

She wants a thorn to prick her tongue again. She wants a bit of sense—sharp, needle-like—to slice its way through the sweet, heavy sting of the air that she is breathing. The mint in her mouth has a jagged edge to it; she tucks it into her cheek.

‘Not the lake,’ she says.

He makes another quiet, smoky sound. ‘Not the lake.’

Her next breath feels a little easier to hear him say it, to hear him agree that the lake—lit by headlights, a wax-coloured moon—will remain a memory, for now at least. Never mind that here, between them still, they are holding a faded mirror to what was once reflected in its water: love, the ghost-like shape of it.

\ \

The rain arrives.

It falls in fat, greasy drops that streak the windscreen. The wipers lay idle with the engine, folded back like thin black wings into the body of the car. Beyond the glass, the town stretches small and doll-like from the sightline of the hill they are parked up on.

Sansa removes her seatbelt, leans back into the leather that cups her like a half-open palm. From the clink of metal and shift of fabric, she knows that Jon has done the same in the seat beside her. She does not look at him; but she finds more comfort than she would like to in the dim warmth she can feel from his breath, his body.

The rain continues to fall.

Her stomach has settled since this morning. She finds it strange that part of what made her sick now feels calming, peaceful even. That the muted shock of seeing him again has so quickly ebbed into the reflexive comfort she has always found in his presence. It seems that what she hoped the years had stripped away is still there, alive and beating beneath her skin. Even as she thinks it, she wonders why she is surprised. Ideas are fleeting and habits engrained, after all.

The rain falls, a little heavier now.

/ /

‘He didn’t hurt me,’ she says after a while. ‘Petyr.’

She closes her eyes to hear that little sound he makes with his tongue against his teeth. Rain rushes with the blood in her ears. She thinks—briefly, madly—of him looming over her, his ink-stained fingers dark against her skin as her body opened for him like a flower.

Sansa looks out through the windscreen now. The raindrops shimmer like the sudden heat between her thighs: silver, slippery.

‘You were going to get out of the car, weren’t you?’ she says quietly. ‘You were going to do something to him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

His voice is slow and lazy; but there is a husk to it. When she meets his gaze, she sees that his eyes are the same darkened hue—a slate sky, an open storm.

‘Petyr,’ she says. ‘My boss.’

‘I was going to have a word,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’

‘Why?’

The skin beneath his eyes tightens. ‘I thought he’d done something. Grabbed you.’ A flicker of something lifts his lip before he settles it. ‘I don’t trust that man. Never have.’

‘I can handle myself.’ She feels a thorn prick her tongue again; she wishes her words could cut like knives. ‘I don’t need a man to protect me.’

‘If Robb—’

‘No,’ she says sharply. ‘No.’

Her words are knives; but his are, too. She feels the sting of them land on her skin like a cut from a half-blunt razor. The drag. That brief, painless beat before blood blooms beneath the blade.

‘This has nothing to do with Robb.’ Bit by bit, she builds the breath back up into her throat. ‘Robb’s dead. Robb’s gone.’ Her voice is metallic on her tongue. ‘Just tell the truth. Tell me the truth, Jon.’

His lip lifts again before he manages to nip it down.

The barely-settled snarl springs from his mouth to explode within his eyes, like gravel flung against glass. There is heat there, hate.

His fingers flex into a death-grip on the steering-wheel, and she knows that he wants to put his hands on her body, wants to tangle a grip into her hair and jag her head back till she cuts herself to quiet with her own damp, pleading moans. She wants it, too.

‘Nobody gets to touch you,’ he says tightly. ‘Not if you don’t want them to.’

The words are an effort, as breathless as they are untrue. What he means to say beats like lightning in his eyes: white-forked against a sky of grey.

Nobody—except for him.

A thrill of something jolts down her spine. Heat spreads beneath her skin like ink, drips into the contours of her hips. She feels full and empty all at once. She feels vicious, light-headed and drunk on it.

‘Plenty of people have touched me,’ she says. ‘It’s been three years, Jon.’

He smacks the steering-wheel with an open palm, and she wants to laugh, to scream.

She is aware even as it is unfolding that she will look back on this moment—glorious as it is fleeting—and revel in its reliving. Because the next time she sees him he will be locked into an armour of self-control, impossible to rile and provoke. He will be able to ask her to tell him anything, to do anything—and she will do it, wordlessly. It will be as though this rain-soaked moment in the car never happened. But it did, and it is, and she will remember it as she is living it now, like a dim-lit dream.

\ \

Quiet lingers as the rain falls.

Waterdrops stack up at the bottom of the windscreen; the grooves in the bonnet run like little rivers. The sky is even darker now. The realisation that night is falling circles as a distant thought behind her eyes.

Slowly, she looks away from the rain-washed world without, and lets her gaze glide across the gearstick, the half-empty water bottle lodged into the centre console. Jon is sitting a little crooked in his seat; this time, his body is angled toward her own.

A tendril of inky hair has fallen free of the bun at the back of his head. It brushes over his brow, glimmers against the blue-black of his beard.

Sansa thinks how easy it would be to reach across to him and smooth the strand back behind his ear. How easy it would be to slide onto his lap. To twist her hand beneath his bun and dig the tips of her nails into his scalp with just the right little bit of bite that he likes. Put her thumb under the silver chain around his throat and pull until his lips loomed close, closer—

‘Is that why you came back?’

—and she realises that his voice is not a breath against her mouth; it is on the other side of the gearstick, the half-empty water bottle lodged into the centre console. A flush settles across her collarbone as she corrects the stance of her shoulders, as she pretends that her body did not betray her by leaning toward him. But it did. Just a little, just enough to put a glimmer in his gaze.

‘Take me home,’ she says. ‘Now.’

Her words are knives; but his are, too. She feels the sting of them bloom back to life on her skin, and realises that for everything they have shouted, nothing has been said.

/ /

The green is a smudge of pastel to the left of the car as it idles in the street.

Sansa keeps her eyes on it as she takes off the seatbelt, flings open the passenger-door. She does not look at him as she steps out onto the wet tarmac. He’ll think her cold; but she doesn’t mind. The coolness suits her.

Inside the hallway, she puts her fingertips to her forehead and closes her eyes. Blinks them back open. Her rain-damp fleece sticks against the front-door, then crackles with static as she pulls away from it. She walks up the stairs half-blind, furious.

Every bit of her body feels staticky, electric. She repeats the lie to try and make herself believe it; but she is too warm, too racked with tension to fall into the soothing balm of it. She is full on his mouth, his sharp words—the heavy hunger that fills her to think of his hands on her hips, her thighs.

All this time, and she is still undone by him so easily, so effortlessly that it brings a shimmer of shame to bruise her skin with a blush as she gets into bed.

Jon hasn’t touched her for three years; but she falls asleep thinking of the silver chain around his neck. The way it used to dip against the skin of her throat—a cool metal kiss.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn’t think anyone would even read/like the first chapter so thanks very much for inspiring me to write a second (and post it unedited so that I don’t overthink it, woo!) we’re off to the Watch for a night out next chapter & I will keep revelling in all this angsty sexual tension because that is my jam 💋 hope it is yours, too. x


	3. Night Shift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > I seem to hate everything I write at the moment, so much so that I am taking a break from tumblr and the like. I was drawn back into this world momentarily today, though 🍒 see you in a little while, probably!

The kitchen is cool and still, limned a pre-dawn shade of blue.

Catelyn works in the mornings, so the house is her own. She luxuriates in the idea that she could sleep late, leave toast-crumbs on the breadboard. Her mother often comes home to find the house tidier than she left it. Ideas are fleeting and habits engrained, after all.

The tiles are glacial beneath her feet. Sansa shifts from one sole to the other as she fills the kettle.

Water bubbles, boils.

Little slips of steam colour the air, turn it silver-shot. She tries not to think about last night, the things that she dreamed. She tries to forget how she woke: taut, hungry—for him, his hands.

A thin, shrill scream makes her start.

The handle of the kettle is heavy and hot against her palm. Fleetingly, there is the temptation to search for something hotter to press her hand against. The side of the kettle, the steam billowing from its spout.

It would sting, scald. She would run the cold tap and it would fade again. There would be no mark left on her skin, just the memory of something that had burned her once.

\ \

Dawn blooms. It makes her think of eggshells, honey. The softness of delicate things, the easy way they can break.

She sits at the kitchen table and stares at the dregs of tea in her cup.

A single grain of sugar clings to the lip of it, plucky and undissolved. She lifts it from the cool ceramic with a fingertip.

It flares like a diamond against her skin in the burst of sunlight clawing through the curtains. Sansa puts it to her lips, her tongue.

The sugar-grain rests there for a moment—a small, sparkling sun—before she swallows it whole.

/ /

Midweek, a colleague asks if anyone can cover his night shift. Sansa agrees. It makes little difference to her if the shelves she is stacking are touched by sunlight or by shadow.

Anything to keep her from dreams that are silver-shot, slippery.

Without her manager haunting the aisles, she wanders out from frozen goods. There is a subtle sort of freedom in touching boxes that don’t leave her fingertips blue. Her hands are warm, and the jars of honey on the shelves shine like jewels.

Theon finds her again a little after midnight. He has a roll-up behind his ear. The inky shape of a sea-creature spreads a single tentacle over the edge of his collar. She lets her eyes linger on it.

‘Nights now, is it?’

She lifts her gaze to the florescent glow of the overhead strip-lights. ‘Yep.’

‘For good?’

‘No,’ she says, and blinks. Stars burst behind her lids. ‘Just for now.’

He touches the roll-up behind his ear reflexively. ‘You’ll be out of it soon enough,’ he says. ‘Back to uni. The city.’

‘The city,’ she says on a strange, low lilt. ‘Oh, the city.’

It is a distant haze at the very edges of her mind, her vision. The mock melodrama of her lilting tone stings, lingers like a burn on her skin. She doesn’t want to go back, and she doesn’t want to stay. Her world is formed of two halves that do not fit together. Tears threaten the back of her throat now. She feels the indignant, hateful flare of self-pity, and tries to smother it.

‘You don’t like it there?’

Sansa makes a sharp movement with her shoulders. ‘I don’t like it anywhere,’ she says. ‘I just had to get out. I thought you’d do the same.’

‘I won’t leave Robb.’

An icy, jagged edge takes hold of her throat now. ‘He isn’t here anymore.’

‘He is.’

‘Theon—’

She wants to turn on her heel and leave him alone with the jewel-like jars, the glaring florescent sun. But she is frozen, her arm across her ribcage, fingers curled like claws into her fleece, her skin. 

‘I go there most nights, you know.’ His voice is easy, light. ‘Just to sit with him. Talk.’ He touches the roll-up behind his ear again, and she lets herself look at the budget bouquet beneath his arm. ‘You could come with me.’

‘I have to work,’ she whispers. ‘Have a nice night.’

Her shoes squeak as she cuts the corner into the next aisle. A quiet ache sits on her. When she bends at the waist, it blooms inside her like a bruise. Her knees touch the cool tiles of the floor. She pins the pain between her hands, crushes it into her sides and tries—silently, silently—to keep it there.

\ \

By the end of her shift, her eyes are dry and tired. The line of her jaw is hard and pale, cut from chalk.

She shuts the door to the staffroom and steps down into the carpark.

There is no hatchback waiting for her. She didn’t expect there to be, and she did. Another set of halves sliding inside her that do not fit together. For the first time since Sunday morning, she thinks of his hands, the silver chain around his throat. She thinks of her dreams, the heavy heat of them.

Anger flares along her spine like a fuse tripped and lit. Sansa is grateful for it. Theon fades from her thoughts: his tired face, the bunch of yellow flowers tucked beneath his arm. Her mind is silver-shot again, and there is comfort in anger, there is safety away from sadness.

She reaches the green as dawn breaks. Honey-coloured light spills across the grass beneath her feet; she steps on jewels, diamonds. Behind her, an engine idles.

The car has almost gone from sight by the time she has turned around; but she catches a glimmer of it before it rounds the corner of the road. Low and dark, the paintwork a shade lighter than the tarmac spun beneath its tires.

/ /

Jeyne picks out a dress that Sansa would never choose for herself. Something sheer and slippery, the faintest impression of black. It feels like silk against her skin, clings to the curves of her body like leather. It looks how she feels: moody, dangerous.

They share a bottle of wine as they get ready. A cheap, tart pinot that sticks to her tongue and sweeps away the tightness from her throat. Sansa takes the dark red lipstick from her bag, hungers for a drink to match its smoky shade.

‘Fuck, you look hot.’

Sansa smiles, caps the lipstick. ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘So do you.’

‘Ready?’

‘Yep.’

The wine glass shimmers a little as she lifts it to her lips to drain it. Sansa turns away from the mirror. It is very important to her that Jeyne doesn’t see the slight tremble in her fingers, the tautness to her jaw. She puts the glass down and smooths her lips together. They feel tacky with colour, as if she has eaten crushed berries, something sticky and sweet.

Arm in arm, they walk through the town like they did when they were teenagers. The careless air she clothes herself with is half wistful, half pretence. Sansa wears it well. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, laughs with the others as they stand beneath the heavy sky in the queue to the club.

The Watch has a new sign, but the same Friday night air. Sansa recognises faces from the hazy past—a few of her brother’s old friends, schoolgirls that haven’t seen a classroom in years—and adjusts her grip on Jeyne’s arm. Things are colliding inside her, the old and the new, and the clash of it is as jarring as it is familiar. She could be seventeen again, waiting for him to finish his shift on the door.

Her thighs skim together as she follows the bobbing movement of the queue. Fleetingly, she thinks of his hands again—on her hips, opening her legs—and she wants wine. Red wine, dark and thick, dense enough to drown her.

\ \

It doesn’t take long to find him once she is inside the club.

He looks like he did on those nights he’d be working the door as she waited in the queue with her friends, and some wasted lout would try and square up to him, demand entry. 

Jon would look straight ahead on nights like that. The muscle would jump in his jaw like a single heartbeat beneath the ink of his beard. His fingers would be knotted into fists at his sides, and there would be the same anticipation in the air as before a lightning-strike. Everyone would wait and watch and will the hit to happen, the strike to fall. It rarely did, because it didn’t need to—the threat of it was enough. 

Now he is behind the bar, staring straight ahead and pretending she does not exist as she shouts her order over the din of the music.

For a moment, she feels small beneath his indifference. Even so, she makes herself stand a little taller. She thinks of him smacking the steering-wheel with an open palm.

Carefully, she pulls up that moment. Stretches it thin, holds it to the light and relives it slowly. Like a dim-lit dream, the way it unfolds. How it felt to be—briefly, madly—in control of him. By the flare of his nostrils, she knows that he is remembering it too.

Sansa smiles at the barman as she pays for the drinks, then sways back toward the dancefloor.

/ /

There are hands on her body: pale, shapeless things. Her time away at university has taught her how to dance, to duck back from hopeful embraces. Sansa spins, and the hands retreat.

Music floods her veins, mixes with the wine and the cloying thrill of anonymity that cloaks her here, now—lost amongst a hundred people. Jeyne tips back her head, laughs. Her hair brushes against Sansa’s shoulder, her cheek. She leans closer, catches the cocoa butter singing off her friend’s skin, joins her laughter.

Hands on her hips now and, for a moment, she rocks into their hold. Jeyne shouts something about Beth, the bar, and Sansa is alone in the crowd. The hands feel good on her hips, hot and strong. Fingers flex; she pretends that they are ink-stained, that they know every knot and dip of her body.

It works for a heartbeat.

Then she sees Jon across the club, staring at her from behind the bar, and there is something in his gaze that grounds her, goads her all at once.

It is a reminder that the hands on her hips don’t belong to him. They are a stranger’s hands, and they could never make her come. They don’t know her body—the flutter of a thumb to get her wet, the slip of a fingertip circling too softly to bear—and they never will.

It is as much a reminder as it is a rebuke.

Behind her, the hands fall away. There is air and empty space. She glides through it, toward it. There is wine in her blood; but not enough to make her weightless. Something else is settling on her skin, spreading beneath it. Her thighs skim together again, and she wants to moan, to crush the sound of her wanting like a berry between her teeth.

Sansa moves toward the smoking area at the same time as Jon does. A mirror-image, a reflection that ripples like a heat-wave through the room. He slopes beneath the archway without looking back.

\ \

Outside, the world is cool and quiet. A clutch of smokers laugh through tight-lipped exhales, blowing smoke toward the blue-black sky. The stars hang low and heavy; the night is silver-shot.

He is leaning back against the rough brick wall. The dark tee-shirt he is wearing is pulled taut against the lines of his body, and the Watch’s crest flares like a wax-coloured moon to the left of his chest. Sansa walks up to him slowly. Her eyes linger on the lean, wolf-like shape of him, the strength in his shoulders. His hands. Ink, a cigarette pinched between his thumb and finger. He waves it at her.

‘Come to apologise?’

She blinks at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That night in the pub,’ he says through a wash of smoke. ‘And in the car after.’ He looks off over her shoulder, rubs a thumb along his nose. ‘You forgot your manners.’

Her breath swells inside her throat. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Talking back like that,’ he says calmly. ‘No please, no thank you.’ He rolls his bottom lip with his tongue, then holds the tip of it between his teeth. ‘Very rude, Sansa.’

Grit knits into her stomach, her chest. ‘I don’t have to listen to you anymore.’

‘You used to like listening to me,’ he says. ‘I think you still do.’

‘Think what you like.’

Her voice is taut with defiance; but that berry is between her teeth again. She wants to crush it, spit it out into his face. Put her tongue to the dark juice, sweet and sticky on his skin.

Jon drops the cigarette onto the concrete now, sweeps a look at her. She is wet and aching—and he knows it. A smile plays at the edges of his lips.

‘What would happen now if I told you to do something?’

She takes a step toward him, daring. ‘Nothing would happen.’

‘If I said—kneel.’ His eyes leap to follow the tremble in her jawbone, her throat. ‘Hmm.’ That sound, like a laugh scratched into a sigh. ‘You want to, don’t you? Look at you.’ He lowers his head toward her a little, drops his tone to smoke and gravel. ‘Get on your pretty little knees, princess.’

Like something stung, she lifts her hand to strike. He catches her wrist between his fingers and pulls her hand against his chest. Her elbow bangs into his ribs, the hard lines of muscle and bone her tongue aches to trace. She shakes her hand inside his grip, glares up at him.

‘This is a game to you, isn’t it?’ she hisses. ‘This has always been a game to you.’

‘You used to play it just as hard as me.’

He glares back at her, dark and dangerous, every bit as daring as she will ever be. The warmth of him floods through his tee-shirt, the sheer slip of her dress. She is wet and aching—and he is hard against her hip. Triumph spreads beneath her skin, then slips away when she realises her knees are longing to kiss the cool concrete beneath their feet.

‘Used to,’ she whispers. ‘I used to, Jon.’ 

A hand on her hip now. 

The power between them is shared, but it is not halved. It is a circle, shifting from one side to the other in a loop that does little to satisfy fairness. He rests inside her grasp; she is held within his, even after all these years.

Her fingers flex, a gentle drag across his chest, and they each take a breath that bleeds together.

‘Hmm.’

Sansa looks from the slate of his gaze to the lazy curve of his lips.

The smile rests there for a moment—a small, sparkling sun lighting the dark—before she leans forward and swallows it whole.

* * *


	4. Teeth

His hand is on her throat, and her blood is beating wildly beneath the span of it.

There is an edge of familiarity in the way he holds her that feels so tender she wants to cry, to shiver or scream. His thumb tracks the tremble along the curve of her jawbone, his nail nipping at her skin until she opens her mouth for him.

Her teeth catch at his bottom lip; her tongue soothes the sting of her bite—instantly, hungrily.

‘There she is,’ he rumbles. ‘Good girl.’

Sansa whimpers. Her bones feel sharp, cutting at the ribbons of her veins. A spark of something tangling with something else inside her: the quick, hot pulse of a desire so reflexive she is already aching for the shapes he will make of it when he touches her skin. Anger, too. That she is made hot by being patronised, that his praise makes her feel on the edge of coming—now, already.

Always.

Jon slides his thumb from her jaw, lowers it to feather the stretch of skin beneath her chin. Her throat goes taut as she tips back her head. His hand is a smooth anchor at her nape, and she wants his mouth, his tongue. She wants his teeth to leave a mark: ruby-bright. Like a burn, a bruise.

The taste of tobacco on his tongue. Something malt and heavy. It lingers longer than his kiss. Her lips feel scalded, swollen. He still has her hand caught against his chest. Her fingers flex weakly; beneath her dress, her thighs shift and stick.

‘What would you do?’ he asks.

There is a hunger in her that scares her, has always scared her. It is infinite: ragged-edged and poured black, depthless. A shadow of the same in his eyes now, and she wants to drown in it, wants her lungs to burst from trying to contain the crushing weight of it.

_Anything_ , she wants to say. _Anything_.

She pushes him away.

\ \

Jeyne finds her in the cloakroom.

‘What are you looking for?’

Sansa straightens up from behind a coat-rack. ‘My jacket.’

‘You didn’t bring one.’

She feigns a smile that she hopes looks a little less strange than it feels. The muscles around her mouth are strained, and her cheeks are stinging beneath the salt-tracks of a few bitter tears that she can’t seem to stop.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh, yeah.’

The lights in the little room are dim, and Jeyne is drunk; but she still sways on the stilts of her heels, squints a look from the doorway.

‘Sans,’ she says. ‘Are you alright?’

The innocence of that question, the impossibility of it. Like a knife parting something cleanly, and the shaky stickering of a smile to cover the wound that is left. 

‘Headache.’ Sansa makes a comic little grimace even as her lips quirk, tremble. ‘I’m for home, I think.’

‘Wait a bit and I’ll walk with—’

‘No,’ she says softly. ‘You stay. I’ll be fine.’

/ /

Walking home, Sansa stays on the well-lit streets. It is something all little girls learn, practice and hone as the softness of childhood fades away from the sharp edges of their cheekbones, falls to fill the curves that attract comment and complaint.

She wraps her arms around her waist, thinks about what a man might feel here, now walking the same route. Nothing, probably. The blissful ignorance of a power laid innate along the lines of their bones. Propped up and pandered to, protected.

It is a blister on her skin: that she resents what she craves. That it felt like her spine became a flicker of fire when she put her hand to Jon’s chest, pushed him away. That he stepped back, bowed to her will completely—that part of her wanted him to put his hand onto her throat again, push his thumb into her mouth. Rough brick against her back, the wet heat of a bite beneath her ear. The sweet, easy rush of giving in.

A car flashes by in a glare of metal and music. Sansa leans away from the edge of the pavement, quickens her footsteps as the pulse of its bass becomes a distant heartbeat.

\ \

There is a cup of tea waiting for her on the kitchen table the next morning. Catelyn is staring into the circle of her own mug. A teaspoon lays crookedly beside it, the tip of it glittering with a dried sheen of sugar.

‘How was your night?’

Sansa picks the spoon up and carries it to the sink. She watches as the glow of sugar-grains fades into the dark, soap-rippled water. She lifts a shoulder.

‘It was alright,’ she says. ‘Beth was there. Few people from school.’

‘Anybody—’

‘Not from Robb’s year,’ she says tiredly. ‘From mine.’

Quiet settles between them, the uneasy plains of it softened only by the sharp lilt of a blackbird from the branches of the magnolia tree outside the kitchen window. Catelyn taps her fingertips against the tabletop, clears her throat with a heavy little hum.

‘Did you see him?’

Sansa closes her eyes briefly. ‘Who?’

‘Him.’

‘He owns the bar,’ she says sharply. ‘So yes, obviously I saw Jon.’

The drumming deepens. It is a dull, repetitive sound, just out of time with the birdsong beyond the glass. Sansa puts her hands into the sink, lets the cooling water swirl around her wrists.

‘He was always with him,’ says Catelyn. ‘Hanging around. I hated it. But he kept him out of trouble.’ Her voice is low and weathered. ‘The one night he needed to be there, the one night I wish he had been—he wasn’t there.’

Sansa looks into the water, then out through the glass. ‘You can’t blame—’

‘Who can I blame, then?’

‘Robb was the one driving,’ she says. ‘Too fast. Nobody made him drive like that.’

The drumming stops. ‘It was Theon’s car.’

‘Theon wasn’t driving it, Mum—Robb was.’

A chair scrapes back, and when Sansa turns away from the sink she finds the kitchen table empty. There is just a scatter of sugar across its sun-splashed top, two teacups cool as the water drying on her wrists.

/ /

Her mother doesn’t speak to her as they walk together toward the church. The usual Sunday crowd has thinned a little; only a few remain for the memorial mass.

Inside the church, there are tall candlesticks gently burning, and enough gilt and silver to make her eyes ache as she takes a seat in the first pew.

Sansa smooths a hand across the skirt of the dark cotton dress she is wearing. It feels rough against her skin. She tugs at a stray thread coming loose of the hem, works it long enough to wind around her fingertip. Pulls it tight till it cuts into her skin, plumps up the flesh above and below it.

As the priest intones something soft and sincere, she tries to keep her eyes from wandering to the candlesticks. The flicker of flame, the dripping wax. It makes her think of the alleyway behind the Watch, the flare of its crest across the chest her hand took comfort in being trapped against.

Something like shame bruises her cheeks with colour now. A flare of pinkish red that she is sure the priest must see and mistake for something soft, sincere as his opening address. She lowers her head quickly, as if in prayer.

Her father’s name lifts away with that of her brother. Beside her, Catelyn stares resolutely ahead: dry-eyed, the faintest tremble bitten back behind her cheek.

Overhead, beams gleam archly in the noonday sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows. Sansa looks from them to the scrap of tissue bundled up between Catelyn’s shaking fingers, and swallows back a pain so quiet it threatens to creep out from her throat and consume her entirely.

It is true that Catelyn managed—somehow—to stay upright after Ned died; but when Robb went, she crumbled. It was like watching a wall buckle and fall apart, stone by stone. A home become a pile of brick and mortar, the heart ripped right out of it.

Sansa cannot hate her mother for letting her home fall down around her head; but sometimes she cannot help but blame her for trapping them both inside its ruin.

\ \

Dusk spills across the horizon, falls on the hills like flecks of gold paint. There is still a gentle warmth to the air, and the long sleeves of Sansa’s dress feel low and hot against her skin.

The church and its hallowed, cloying interior have fallen well behind her. The green is a smudge of ink; the street her house leans against faded as a memory. She tucks her thumbs into her sleeves, feels the prick of her fingernails through the fabric.

She is walking a route from years ago, and she remembers every part of it. The dip down from the pavement, the faded yellow lines at the side of the road. A tree tangled with blossom—primrose, white—and, in the dappled shade beneath its branches, Jon.

He is working wire with a pair of pliers. Behind him, the front-door is hanging slightly open, spilling a radio-warble out into the garden. Sansa puts her hand on the low wooden gate, pushes it till the slats scrape back across the little gravelled path. He looks up from the wire, his hands, and the world is still.

‘Memorial mass,’ she says as he sweeps a look at her: pinned hair, dark dress. ‘Three years since Robb, five since my dad.’

Jon gives a single, careful nod. ‘I know.’

‘Mum told me to cover my neck.’

A glimmer of something in his eyes, in her own. The way it passes between them—soundless, soft as the mellow glow of the fading sunlight. She feels the weight of it settle on her skin like a bruise.

Give her hate and anger, tears shaded blue with bitterness and a troubled, distant kind of ache. She can handle that, she can compress it, move quietly away from it. But the little creases at the corners of Jon’s eyes when he gifts her one of his softer smiles—there is a thorn beneath her tongue to see it, and she wants to clamp her teeth down tight around it. Draw out the sting, the soundless beat. Anything to contain it, quietly.

A soft thump makes her look away from his face, his eyes. He has dropped the coil of wire. The grass slips against his bare feet as he steps toward her. Lifts a hand.

He pulls the scarf gently away from her neck. The black silk slips through his fingers, bares the mark left by his mouth just below the spot where her pulse blooms against her skin. His thumb finds the ragged beat now, skates across it gently.

She sinks toward him.

/ /

There is a new rug in the hallway, and the walls are no longer painted apple-green. Her hair looks very red against the whitewashed stone. She gazes dreamily at her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall for a moment, before it is eclipsed by the broad width of his back.

It unfolds between them like it always used to. There is an easiness to it all, a lightness that belies its depth. His fingers catch at the dark cotton dress, knot into the hem of it. The wall is smooth on her crown as she tilts her throat for him to lay his mouth against.

They both know that she will not let him inside of her yet; but she puts her own wrists into the silky black scarf still wrapped around his palm, waits for him to tie it.

He tells her that she is good, and warmth blooms between her hipbones. There is a tautness to it, an almost-ache. His thigh slips up against the juncture of her own. She gasps, settles. A small rock of her hips, and he is breathing something soft into her ear: her name. It is too much and not enough; her eyes are closed, everything is needle-point on her skin, sharp, unbearable.

‘I feel like I might come,’ she whispers. ‘Just from this.’

‘Come then,’ he murmurs. ‘For me.’

He is a brute to say it, and the way her body rises to respond to the rough command makes her think of herself as an animal, something wild and untamed. Or the sea, the emerald-dark depths of it. Churning, crushing. But she needs it, like air, like light—she needs it.

‘For me.’

‘Jon,’ she says. ‘Jon, I— _oh_.’

Air and light, the darkness in between.

‘Hmm,’ he whispers. ‘That’s it, Sansa. That’s it.’

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kept nearly slipping into an Irish accent writing this, so I think it might be time to revisit _let the rough winds fly_ soon! I plan to finish both that and this, then write a fourth & final one-shot in the silver fox/summer rain universe; & then—who knows? I may be done for a little while. Before all that though, I need to get my act together and catch up on all the comments & fics I have missed over the last month or two. I hope you are well; it feels nice to be ‘back’ ❤️


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